Creating system image of all partitions with Windows Backup

[lose311]

I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64 on a Lenovo T430u, and I would love to reinstall a clean copy of Windows without all the bloatware that came preinstalled (not to mention the ~15G of recovery partitions). But I do want to create an image of the OEM partitions in case I need to revert the drive to factory status at some point in the future.

I am running Windows "Create a system image" tool right now, and I did select all three partitions for it to back up (System_drv, Windows7_OS, and Lenovo_Recovery). I have never used Windows-made images before, so I want to be sure that this is essentially an image of the whole drive (including MBR, etc), so when the time comes if I need to restore to factory settings I can do so by restoring this image and the three partitions. Is this the case?

I'm also installing Macrium free at the moment if that would be a better tool for this job.

thanks. I attached a screenshot of Disk Management if that is needed. You can ignore the Blue ( D: ) drive as that's my external USB backup drive.

 

[whs]

I would use Macrium. It is more robust. Just check all partitions or the whole disk. Make yourself a WinPE recovery CD also. Here is a tutorial that may be helpful.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I